5/24/2023 0 Comments Macmagic jack skellyHow could the golden glow of “Kokomo” go together with the filth of “Garbage Dump”? However, these two distinctly Southern Californian cultural touchstones are less of a stark juxtaposition than they seem. Now, in many respects, the connection between the Beach Boys’ good vibrations and the Manson Family’s undeniably bad ones seems like a shocking clash. It’s this relationship between Charles Manson and Dennis Wilson-the dune-buggy and weapons-hoarding dark to the Beach Boys’, at least aural, sun-kissed coastal light-that writer Jack Skelley, along with sublime illustrations by Brian Walsby, mines in his delightfully deranged chapbook Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson. And perhaps nobody embodies the act of going under completely–quite literally in the end–than Beach Boy burn-out Dennis Wilson. Manson, the Family, and the California outliers involved in his Pig-scrawled mania somehow have come to represent that undertow. As much as the American imaginary is all hung up on the legend of the American dream, there’s also a dark underbelly of violence, death, destruction, group psychosis, and bonkers religiosity that lies underneath the sea to shining sea promise. Despite the real blood-soaked horror and tragedy of the murders, Manson and those that got, both deliberately and inadvertently, sucked into his lunatic fringe orbit belong to a particular part of America’s mythology. It’s no surprise that our Lady of California Lana Del Rey would evoke that small, wild-eyed, and stinky (any description of Manson seems to mention his peculiar aroma) cult leader figure. And who doesn’t sense Charles Manson, his acid-headed Family, and the echoing terror of the Tate-LaBianca murders in these sweltering and wildfire-choked days of early August? These murders that occurred from August 8-10, 1969 would, along with other ideals-shattering events like Altamont, irreparably shake the country awake from its California Dreamin’, destroying hopes of peace freak utopia and ushering in decades upon decades of capitalistic trickle-down Boomer narcissism, of which we’re clearly still trapped. “Topanga’s hot today, Manson’s in the air,” sings Lana Del Rey in the second verse of her song “Heroin” on Lust for Life.
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